56 :: Faites Vos Jeux: Announcing MapRoulette Next Generation

MapRoulette is a program that captures likely OpenStreetMap problems and presents them to the user for fixing. It’s amazing how much more you can get down when the decisions of what to do next are removed for you. I spend some time correcting the maps using MapRoulette – and in some ways it was satisfying, but in others, it felt kind of silly fixing maps in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, when I should be improving the map of my neighbourhood.

So today I thought I would try to improve my neighbourhood map. Adding all the shapes of the houses was too much work so I checked around to see if I could find any errors. And I did notice an omission: there’s a curious park with a roundabout that wasn’t designated on OSM.

But I wasn’t sure where to outline the map because the tree cover of the satellite imagery was too thick to be sure. So, I took a walk with my GPS and tried to remember how to use it after so much time away from it…

After walking around, I returned and uploaded my tracks to OSM. I think it’s fascinating that something that is uploaded as this…

Gets rendered as this:

What’s crazy is that I don’t even know the name of this park. In order to figure this out, I checked out the City of Windsor’s GIS service: Map my city… which is slow and kinda flaky. And with some wrestling, I figure it out that it’s called Devonshire Park!

This park isn’t mentioned in the list of parks on the City of Windsor’s website, but if I grab the kml file from the City of Windsor Open Data Catalog and open it in Google Earth, it confirms it: